Scents and Sensibility: Bringing a City to Life

DATE / TIME

VENUE

FESTIVAL PASS EVENT

LANGUAGE

This session is in English

MODERATED BY

Kristina Tom

DESCRIPTION

As 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire opines, an astute observer of a modern city is no mere gawker, but “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”. How do these writers – two novelists and one filmmaker-scriptwriter – read the urban landscape for clues to the inner lives of its characters? From the steaming underbelly of Bogota and Bangkok, to the sensuality of Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, and finally to a hot and smothering Singapore, these panellists draw out the sensory appeal of their settings.

This session is made possible with the assistance of the Embassy of Colombia.

FEATURING

Born in Colombia in 1965, Santiago Gamboa wrote The Art of Losing (1997), which was adapted into a film by director Sergio Cabrera. He is also the author of travel books, October in Beijing (2001) and Oceans of Sand (2014). His other novels include Necropolis (2009), winner of the Otra Orilla Literary Prize, and Return to the Dark Valley (2017). His books are currently translated into 17 languages.

Born in Vietnam, Tran Anh Hùng currently lives in Paris. His film, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. His other films include Cyclo (1995), which won the Golden Lion at Venice, The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), I Come with the Rain (2008), Norwegian Wood (2010) and Eternity (2016).

Sharlene Teo has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship. She is a 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellow and a 2017 University of Iowa Honorary Writing Fellow. Recently shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize, she is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for her first novel, Ponti.